This Font Depicts What Dyslexia Is Like

Daniel Britton was diagnosed with dyslexia in his final year as a graphic design student at the London School of Communications. He quickly found that the public perception of this learning disability was far from the reality. His classmates and teachers just thought he was slow, or at the very least lazy, and even public awareness campaigns often got depictions of dyslexia wrong. So he designed a font, called Dyslexia, meant to simulate the difficulty dyslexics have when they try to read. He erased roughly 40% of the lines from a classic Helvetica typeface, turning a clear, standard font into something that's quite difficult to make out. The 40% wasn't a scientific figure, but one Britton came to organically in his efforts to make a font that was hard to read, but not impossible. He's also not trying to recreate the visual experience of dyslexia. "...awareness ads will represent text as seen by dyslexics as a bunch of blurry letters, or an upside-down letter form," Britton told Fast Co.Design. "At least for me, that's not what it's like at all. It's more like text looks normal, but the part of my brain that decodes it just isn't awake." The good news is that his font worked: not only did it help his classmates understand his learning disability, it got him a job creating public awareness ads for the UK Parliament. Learn more about dyslexia in the videos below.